CRIS/OAR synergy at The Technical University of Denmark

Background

Orbit is the Current Research Information Systems and
Institutional Repository/Open Access Repository at The Technical
University of Denmark (DTU). DTU is a broadly founded,
business-oriented elite university where research goes hand in hand
with education, innovation and advisory functions for government
authorities. The University has a staff of more than 4.500, around
1.500 scientific personnel and more than 800 are PhD fellows.

All staff is registered in Orbit and can register publications,
projects and activities, but only publications from the scientific
personnel is counted as DTU records, other records are Personal
records, which means that these publications are not counted in the
yearly research assessments based partly on data from Orbit.

Responsible for the development of Orbit and the daily operation
and administration of the system is ePub, a small team under The
Technical Information Center (Library), that staffs seven full time
employees 3 librarians, 3 developers/programmers and one
manager.

Mission of the Orbit

Orbit is first of all a CRIS and secondly an Institutional
Repository. This has impact on the priority of the development of
the system. Orbit has a very high coverage of bibliographic
metadata, but lacks when it comes to full texts.

Orbit is the main data provider of research information to all
web-based communication platforms internally and externally at DTU.
It provides a main search interface, web services that provides
personal bibliographies; project information and CV data to
researchers own web pages as well as department sites. Orbit also
provides an expert database, where researchers can be searched and
found by expert knowledge described with abstract and keywords.

Orbit also functions as Institutional Repository and researchers
can upload their full text articles and at the same time decide on
what access their should be to the article, either: Personal (no
public access), Campus-wide access and Public Access (Open
Access).

Business case

ePub is the service provider to the DTU administration who is
the customer. As a CRIS Orbit has placed it self as an important
tool for management information especially when it comes to the
yearly assessments made by the DTU administration.

Orbit's economy has developed from a yearly-negotiated contract
to a running contract, and this year to a part of the basis economy
of the library section, now being at a level of 3 full-time
equivalent. The development of the contract with DTU management can
be seen as recognition of Orbits value to the university and Orbit
is now seen as an essential library services towards the
university.

Service sustainability

The CRIS role of Orbit is one of the central components of the
University's IT infrastructure for communication, management and
hereby fully sustainable.

Running the daily operation in an organisation that changes all
the time and has grown a lot over the past couple of years is a
demanding task. Every time DTU makes organisational changes it
means new, issues like: new department names, new employees and
employees moving to other departments.

A couple of years ago SCRUM methods where implemented into our
organisation and development of Orbit. In the beginning this was
very fruitful, it improved the way we estimated and broke down
complex tasks into manageable tasks. In spite of this, a growing
number of small tasks and bug fixes made our team forget what had
been learned and the benefits that had earlier been won by SCRUM.
This was one of the reasons why we implemented ideas from ITIL late
last year. We hope that ITIL will help to take away many of the
assessments of tasks from the developers by defining clear roles
within our group and by building up an actual helpdesk and a single
point of contact. We are still in the very beginning of the
implementation - but just having the change of "how-to-do" things
in mind has been fruitful. Small but important changes have been
introduced such as: Single point of contact for our users e.g. one
phone number and one helpdesk email, implementing work flows at the
helpdesk, rearranging our bug-tracking system, building up a help
Wiki www.orbit.dtu.dk/help for our users and also for our own sake.
These steps will hopefully in time give us more time to make needed
changes and development in Orbit. Already we believe that the ITIL
ideas have brought better service to our users.

Overview of current contents

Orbit has a very high coverage of bibliographic registration of
scientific publications (9 scientific document types, like articles
in journal, books and conference papers), popular science, patents,
projects, student theses and reports and persons. It is mandatory
to upload PhDs, and post-prints of articles published in
peer-review scientific journals. Despite, the fact that DTU has had
an Open Access policy for more than two years, coverage of full
texts in Orbit is still rather poor, below 10%, expect for PhDs
where the coverage is closer to 90%, but PhDs are uploaded by the
PhD-administration at DTU. One of the reasons why the coverage of
post-prints of journals articles is still low is maybe a result of
an OA policy that has no consequences for the researchers.

Key challenges

OA will be one of the big challenges for Orbit in 2008. DTU
expects to be part of a self-archiving project with 4 other Danish
universities in 2008, the project aims to boost OA content in the
participating universities IR with 10-15%. The CRIS/OAR model is
used by all universities in Denmark all having the same problem -
there isn't much Open Access content in the repositories, despite
the fact that they all are well embedded in the institutions, have
reasonable high level of faculty engagement and very high coverage
of high quality bibliographic metadata.

The project will try to facilitate ideas and solutions that will
benefit the researcher in such a way that self-archiving become
easier and more valuable for the researcher. Even though, evidence
shows that the only way to really boost OA is by mandating it. OA
mandates in Denmark do not seem to be implemented in a near future.
OA might be on the library agenda but it is still not considered
important at higher political levels in Denmark and it seems that
it will take some time before the political agenda will change and
the funding organisations will demand OA - thereby changing the
researchers behaviour. DEFF (a kind of Danish JISC) is planning a
Danish OA roadmap that will provide a plan for initiatives that are
going to boost OA in Denmark.

Not many non-mandating OA/Self-archiving initiatives have been
tried in Denmark, so in the mean time we might as well get started,
as Jens Vigen form CERN has put it "just do it, don't spend to much
time thinking about it". Hopefully Open Repositories 08 will
provide us good inspiration.